Microsoft ordered to stop selling Word
- Posted by: JP Smith | August 13, 2009
- Filed Under: Microsoft, Business, Law and Order
Uh-oh, it looks like Microsoft may have been caught infringing on another company's intellectual property, yet again.
This time, the party leveling this charge is i4i LP, who owns a technology that allows complex documents to be treated as databases. The Canadian firm alleged, and a U.S. judge agreed, that Microsoft was using their product in Microsoft Word with licensing it.
As a result, the judge awared i4i roughly $290 million in damages and ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word 2003, 2007 and future versions of Word in the U.S. as long as they contained i4i's technology.
Microsoft says it will appeal the ruling, saying that i4i's patent on the technology is not valid but, considering that i4i's first customer, after receiving this patent, was the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office itself, they might have a hard time with this one.
Microsoft has 60 days to comply with the judge's order so, we could see Microsoft having to cough up some huge licensing fees or having to explain to customers why their office suites contain everything but Word.
UPDATE: It appears that Microsoft was well aware of i4i's technology when it was in the process of developing Word 2003 and claimed that Word 2003 would make it "obselete", emails related to the case show. However, it appears that i4i technology was not only not obseleted but, apparently, integrated into Word, infringing on their patent.
Also, the article goes on to say that Microsoft could sell patched versions of Word that strip out the custom XML that is in dispute. However, how this might impact end users and how they use this product is not known.
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